


The Great Filter Theory

by TheHSPlayer



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Angst, Asylum, Fluff, M/M, Psychology, mentions of toxic relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25100125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHSPlayer/pseuds/TheHSPlayer
Summary: What is the metaphor behind Dib Membrane's alien story?
Relationships: Dib/Zim (Invader Zim)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 48





	The Great Filter Theory

"So, Dib. Do you feel like talking to me today?" Grace sat in front of him, perfect manicured nails on top of her notebook and pencil, also ready to stand up and leave if there would be no response, but general rule dictated she had to wait at least 30 minutes before allowing the kid to leave. 

There was a soft "brr" noise, from the clock near both of them, counting the seconds. It wasn't a comforting tick tock or a quiet analog, but a constant buzz in a different tone from the blinding led lights in the ceiling. 

She waited, as the young man thought of his options, looking at her, then at himself, and trying to silently reason inside his mind, before shaking his head slightly, and repeating the process. 

Grace was new in the clinic. She was given little to no instructions, but one of them, and perhaps the only important one was "don't mention Zim". Not because it would trigger a negative response. On the contrary. However, there was not a file but a whole cabinet dedicated to "Zim" when it came to Dib Membrane. There would be no new information, but... 

"I... I hope you don't mind me if I ask about Zim?" she asked anyway. "I'm new, maybe you can tell me the story from scratch?"

She had it. Like ten previous psychiatrist, she got what she wanted. She breathed air into Dib Membrane's lungs, and saw him gain passion and life. 

She saw the young man sitting up, chin all the way up, and a desperation, mixed with nostalgia and wanton adoration shining in his eyes. 

"Zim?" he asked in a whisper, as if he had been fooled thousands of times before with similar uttered words.

So that was his voice. Grace never heard it before. 

"Yes, Dib. Tell me all about him" She had herself in high regards, she could see through the fabrication of aliens and paranormal adventures. She would be able to see the metaphor, she promised herself, so she was ready to analyze to detail every last word by this kid. She would figure out exactly what made him invent this character, or project into a poor classmate. Conclusions were not reached yet by any of the psychiatrists before they left for more promising projects. So it would be her job to figure out what was the deal with the son of one of the most powerful men walking on earth.

"Do you know about the Great Filter Theory?" he asked, with such eloquence, that Grace knew she was before a paranormal savvy. 

Mentally, she wrote in her mind looking for approval with interests out of the ordinary, lack of praising from mother side.

"Well, I have read maybe a Buzzfeed article about. All living beings in the universe pass through a filter. Ours could have been the specific arrange of molecules that allowed us to be who we are, or the filter is yet to happen"

"Yes, yes, correct! It also relates to alien contact. Why have we not been contacted? We are primitive, we don't travel outside our galaxy, we might just be zoo animals for alien tourists, we could be an implant, a simulation, but what if...!"

"What if?" Grace echoed, smiling with the same tenderness Dwicky did at some point in Dib's life. 

"What if... it was a matter of location? We were just... off, from a straight line"

Grace braced herself a bit. Huh. 

"I am not sure I'm following there, Dib" 

"Okay, yes, sorry, you're right. What if the great filter is an alien invasion? What if the filter that decides who lives and who dies, depends on some aliens flying through the universe in a straight line and we are just not in that line?" 

She blinked once, and it took her two seconds to react, as she was trying to place data together. But this data was a giant puzzle, and she had two totally unrelated pieces in her hands. 

"So... you saw saying that we might depend on another intelligent lifeform to decide our fate in the future, and we might just never die because they are... not looking at us?" 

"Yes, exactly, you got it. But now, hear me out. What if..." he licked his lips "what if these aliens could turn to us and "filter" our existence, if they found we are invadable?"

Invasion. she had read the word several times in his records. He was obsessed with this, and partly, she blamed it on this city full of maniacs, the national capital of UFO enthusiasts. For an impressionable young boy whose family pushed him away constantly, finding a circle of conspiracy chasers must have been like the key to forgive his family from abandoning him. Thinking there was a reason for everything would have been pretty attractive to him.

"Alright, I suppose this could work like any army” she humored him “they would send a scouting squad..." 

"No, doctor, not a squad" he interrupted, lips trembling in a half smile, and his arms scrambled under his straitjacket "Zim"

She was glad she wasn't comfortable enough yet to request him to be freed from his restraints, because immediately he wanted to draw Zim's house for her, he wanted to draw Zim, make gestures about his height, his skin color, the shape of his head. But even without the visual help, he had all of this so memorized, it was impressive for Grace to understand Dib spent most of his childhood with this imaginary alien, he had humanized it with complex emotions. 

Maybe even elevated him to a deity in his mind.

Dib told her all the details about Zim's home. He knew the color of the curtains,the couch, the amount of tiles it took to walk from the entrance to the TV. He knew the gradients of the wallpapers, the smell of the house. 

She immediately thought about an abuse situation. Trauma related to a house with similar characteristics. She thought about a wild imagination of a young kid who could conceive a classmate living alone in a poor neighborhood with a pair of neglectful "robot" parents, and a crazy dog. Maybe at his age he couldn't place Zim as a homeless person, so he invented this. Or maybe he associated the place with the location where he could play in between two houses in a cul-de-sac, friendless, loveless.

It was just too much for an imaginary friend, so she discarded that option, and considered it a reality. Not the alien part, but the Zim part. 

"So you say that Zim was sent to cull our planet?" 

"No, no. Zim was sent to us to invade he would take this world and offer it to his Tallest, his leaders. If they saw it fit, we would become... I don't know, maybe a fast food planet. but if we would be culled, it wasn't Zim's decision" 

"Alright. And you say you stopped Zim, many years, yes?" 

"He was strong, but I was stronger. Humanity, hope, justice was stronger!"

The fantasy narration distracted Grace for some time, but eventually she came to her senses. The way Dib described it, Zim was also a neglected kid, who had taken damaging tendencies to prove his worth with abusive influences (adult drug users?), and had bullied Dib who got into a codependency with him, so they could validate each other. 

It was heartbreaking, knowing Dib's only source of friendship had been the kid who he fought during his whole childhood. They were bad influences for each other.

"He was a menace... just a menace" Dib whispered, licking his lips. His voice had died down when he got to the part when they were 14, going to 15. 

""Was"?" Grace insisted. 

"He was an alien. All I knew since I was twelve it was that he was a danger to himself, and others. He was ruthless and soulless, he took joy in seeing others suffer, but..." Dib's hands made a few grabbing motions under the restraints of his jacket, and he sighed deeply. "He could cry. I saw him, a few times. I never really... thought about his emotions. I always thought he could be euphoric, one way or another in the spectrum. But... Halloween was tough on him, on both of us" 

Grace did not have time to hear about Halloween, not that day at least. She had completely forgotten to write notes, but she had good memory to process it later on. 

"And it was about the time he... was banished." 

Air stuck in Grace's chest. Zim had been abducted? murdered? 

"What do you mean, Dib?" 

"His mission was called off, but he wasn't allowed to go back to his planet. All his resources were cut, and... well, his Computer, his ship... everything stopped working"

Grace knew there was more. More to this story, and she was absolutely certain that it was meant to be a metaphor of Zim's poverty, maybe some latent feelings in between, something related to Zim moving away, or even changing from the innocent kid who didn't know any better, to an adolescent with other needs, other time of his life completely. Something that made the difference for Dib, who didn't have his emotional outlet now. 

"And you'd think it was my time, right? He was weak, confused... anyone would think I would grab him and dissect him, right?" he asked, trying to validate his own delusions of self harm projected to others, that had to be it, right? So Grace waited, as he struggled to remember, or to confess what he did. "But I didn't. I just... took him home, gave him a place in my garage. I gave him a blanket, a cocoa, and my shoulder to cry. We both cried for days because we knew we lost everything. He lost his reason to live, and I was so fucking scared of losing him, I cried for myself"

  
  


The best intentions were not always the correct ones. Just because people loved canaries, it didn't make it right to keep them in cages to be admired for days. 

That's what Grace thought about all the things that Dib told her then. 

The way he always seemed to control Zim's walks around town. How he always made sure he had a phone with active GPS. The times they held hands while around their classmates, and how he had lied to Zim, telling him it was because Dib felt insecure if they didn't. How their cuddling sessions became sex, and then how slowly, room by room, they took over the Membrane household, emulating a family. 

He repeated, over and over, peppered around the whole narration how exactly he knew he was being possessive and controlling. How he always tried to be part of Zim's plans, even to cook. How they had to work in the same place, or how they needed to apply for the same college. There was always an "or else" lingering in each action, and Dib knew he had to stop, but he had became an addict, and Zim was all he had, all he knew, and all he wanted.

Zim on the other hand was more extreme. He put collars on Dib, he insisted on wasting days nesting in their bed, and chased away other people. Zim controlled Dib's diet, his TV intake, his social media. Zim monopolized every plan they had, and was the king of the house, like the whole world he was supposed to invade had reduced to that little house, and now he wanted to micromanage every detail of it.

  
  
  


They were two massive black holes trying to consume the other, falling and falling to an endless space time rip. Until college didn't make any sense, or work. They could grow their own food, were smart enough to travel the world, and any other world. They could be eternal. Time, space, nothing was important, in their need to cut themselves from the world who was giving its back at them, they walked with the divine, blissful ignorance of the reality surrounding. They were looking beyond the stars and beyond the edge of the universe. 

"We were so happy. I was his, and he was mine. We were all we needed."

It seemed like a perfect recipe for disaster, but it was controlled, apparently. Grace needed more details, but so far she could see that Dib didn't need much more than he already had with Zim, and their apathy for humanity made them wary enough to live secluded, but not aggressive. 

"But we started catching some signals, one day. They were faint, but Zim was very distressed about them. He said something about a "fry lord", he wasn't too clear... he was erratic, and I wanted to help, I really did!" 

He proceeded to comment scientific details she couldn't follow. By this point she was just allowing him to vent his frustrations and recreate the feelings so he could get rid of them with each blurted word, catching some words here and there to nod, pretending to understand the calculations and pie charts he tried to describe.

Zim had left, with the excuse of being "too exposed" and sacrificing himself for the greater good by not allowing Dib to suffer his same fate, or worse. 

One night they were together, and the next day ZIm had disappeared from the city as mysteriously as he arrived, ten years ago. 

"I looked and I looked, doctor. I... never stopped looking. I just wish they gave me some pen and paper to try and create a blueprint. They won't let me work, doctor. When I leave, I'm not sure how much time will it take me to find Zim"

  
  


Dib didn't cry. According to his records, Dib told this same story 375 times before she arrived. Sometimes he said it to himself, and sometimes to a willing ear. 

So far, he enjoyed sitting with some deaf schizophreniac who never realized Dib was directing his words at him, and allowed the dam of his past to open full force until he was too dehydrated to continue talking.

"I'll see if I can get you some pen and paper, Dib" Grace cut the silence. 

"Thank you, doctor." His tone was soft, but Grace could tell that he knew perfectly well that neither of those items would get to his hands, as he was promised the same several times in the past. He was humoring her.

"This has been... well, quite the story, Dib. I will definitely want to hear more, but for today I'd like you to rest, okay?" 

"Okay" 

Dib was always way more compliant once he was allowed to talk, according to records, so Grace did not take it as a victory yet. She would get to the bottom of this. 

"I'll see you tomorrow, alright? We will talk about picking your lips, it's not good for you" 

"Okay, doctor. Good night." 

Grace looked at the clock, with a surprised expression. She had been sitting there for four hours.

"Good night, Dib" she echoed, leaving the room. She needed to go back home and have a drink as she wrote down everything she had before forgetting any detail.

  
  


**

> _ Intense need for validation - Possessive tendencies and codependency with early life time lover - Father ignoring h-  _

Blinking a few times, she realized her phone had been in silence since Dib's interview, and now it was flashing with a new call from the asylum, on top of 6 missing calls.

Looking at the hour again she realized she had been chugging bourbon and vomiting theories on paper all night. It was three AM. 

"Halley speaking" she answered. "WHAT?" 

Grace run to the living room, turning on the TV only to watch flashing news. Every channel where she clicked there was a closer image to the asylum. Firemen controlling a leak of gas, and the alarms blaring in the distance. 

_ "Witnesses claim that the facilities were attacked by an unidentifiable flying object, with the sole purpose of destroying a wall. There are no injured or dead, however, the authorities are still in search of patient Dib Membrane, son of the famous..." _

There were blurry pictures from CCTV cameras around the building at the moment that the U.F.O approached the asylum. Grace felt a shiver down her spine upon seeing the apparatus and thinking "voot cruiser". 

She felt her eyes sting at catching a glimpse of a squared head with two long antennae and magenta eyes, feeling troglodyte. She was nothing more than a kid playing doctor with other kids. 

Grace Halley had a career change that night. Next day when she was called from work, she was in the process of registering for an organization interested in her story, The Swollen Eyeball.

  
  


The end


End file.
